Friday Night AI: “AI to Address Misinformation and Fake News”

Panelists: Prof. Ceren Budak (School of Information) and Rada Mihalcea (Michigan AI)

Moderator: Prof. Benjamin Kuipers (Michigan AI)

The proliferation of misleading information in everyday access media outlets such as social media feeds, news blogs, and online newspapers has made it challenging to identify trustworthy news sources. Over the past few months, the amount of misinformation shared online has been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic (which has sometime been also referred to as an infodemic) as well as by the ongoing political debates and the upcoming federal elections. Artificial Intelligence provides ways to identify misinformative content online, and to potentially curb its spread. Join us for a conversation with Michigan experts Prof. Ceren Budak and Prof. Rada Mihalcea, who will discuss how Artificial Intelligence can be used to address fake news and misinformation.

What are the ways that AI may be used to identify misinformation and fake news? What are the challenges encountered when developing such AI systems? What are the benefits and risks of using automated ways to fight misinformation?

About the panelists:

Ceren Budak is an Assistant Professor of Information, School of Information and Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, College of Engineering at the University of Michigan. Her research interests lie in the area of computational social science. She is particularly interested in the use of large scale data sets and computational techniques to study problems with policy, social and political implications.

Rada Mihalcea is a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan and the Director of the Michigan Artificial Intelligence Lab. Her research interests are in computational linguistics, with a focus on lexical semantics, multilingual natural language processing, and computational social sciences. Together with her research lab and collaborators, she has worked on the problem of automatic deception detection for more than ten years, addressing among others the detection of deception in language and multimodal streams, the identification of fake news, and identity deception. She is the recipient of a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers awarded by President Obama (2009) and a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (2019).